CRM For Legal: Relationships Are Not Easy
Please welcome Above the Law's newest legal technology writer, Sean Doherty, who today discusses platforms for customer relationship management (CRM).
Ed. note: Please welcome our new technology columnist, Sean Doherty, who will analyze and review technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments.
Have you heard anyone say ever that relationships are easy? Whether personal or professional, relationships don’t come easy to anyone. There are no relationship wunderkinds. There is, however, software for law firms and lawyers that identifies and analyzes how the firm interacts with customers or clients to build and maintain relationships.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software for the legal industry is quickly rounded up: Aderant Holdings Inc.’s CRM4Legal for Microsoft Dynamics, LexisNexis InterAction, and Thomson Reuters ContactNet. Besides relationship building and tracking, CRM4Legal and Interaction are modular platforms offering tools for marketing and communication, sponsorships and events, opportunity tracking, referrals, and basic matter management. But if you only need software to build, track, analyze and maintain relationships, look at Microsoft Dynamics, which will require development resources, ContactNet or gwabbit contact and relationship management software.
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Gwabbit? Yes. The Carmel-by-the-sea, California-based company is an InterAction development partner that manufactures and distributes its own CRM tools around the gwabbit Enterprise Server (gES). Before I dig into gES, I will review InterAction and bring you up to date with the latest enhancement to its InterAction IQ module, which compares and appears to compete with gwabbit’s Relationship Manager. Relationships are hard and developer relationships are no exception.
InterAction is billed as an enterprise CRM software platform for professional services. It provides a broad view of client interactions, capturing and tracking telephone calls and identifying calendar appointments and events. It integrates with firm data from time and billing systems, human resources systems and document management systems. The CRM platform also interfaces Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Active Directory and other Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) services and synchronizes directly with Outlook or IBM Corp.’s Lotus Notes.
LexisNexis provides a view of InterAction contact data and client relationships in a task panel embedded in Outlook 2007 and 2010. See Figure 1.
InterAction uncovers subtle relationships among clients and prospective clients and includes features to: notify you when someone at the firm interacts with your contacts; put ethical walls around contacts that limit the view of confidential information; identify cross-selling and new client service opportunities; and prepare contact lists for mass mailings and invitations.
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InterAction’s add-on software modules add features and functionality to the platform. Add-on modules mine matter management systems for lawyer or personnel experience, import existing matters from external systems, track matter membership, manage distribution lists, and view all matters related to a contact.
LexisNexis Legal & Professional on July 7 announced new data management capability in the IQ module. The enhancement automatically captures email signature blocks for contact information and updates data in the InterAction CRM system; the contact updates flow downstream to InterAction Mobility and its Outlook integration.
The InterAction IQ module features a “who knows whom” function that uncovers client and prospective client connections and cross-selling opportunity. The IQ module mines InterAction activities and a firm’s email and calendar systems for engagement data and measures connection strength with an “IQ score.”
The enhanced IQ module sounded much like the gwabbit Enterprise Server (gES) and Relationship Manager. LexisNexis informed me there is overlap between the two products and customers can choose their preference.
Gwabbit Enterprise Server
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The gwabbit Enterprise Server (gES) is an automatic enterprise-scale email signature contact capture engine. It works with InterAction by automatically driving high volumes of new contact data into a supported CRM, such as InterAction. Gwabbit is designed with the assumption that contact sourcing from user address books is incomplete and continuously out-of-date. Facts I can attest to.
The gES automatically looks up CRM, address book and email signature data on LinkedIn to verify a contact’s current email address. It also synchronizes contact information with BoardEx, relational capital management data, to show how clients connect to global business leaders.
The gES resides behind the enterprise firewall and receives copies of incoming emails or a mirror of the Exchange Journal via an Internet Information Server (IIS) Virtual SMTP Gateway to capture and process email signatures. See Figure 2.
Gwabbit’s Relationship Manager puts new contact information to work in reports and visual graphics. Basic and advanced search functions generate contact lists in columns by name, company, title, email/domain, geographic location, and last known activity date. Contact lists can be sorted by columns and data can be exported to Excel and XML files.
Like InterAction IQ’s “who knows whom” report, clicking on one or more contacts generates a list of “known by” relationships—people in the firm that know the contacts you selected. Gwabbit automatically calculates relationship strength scores like InterAction IQ. Reports can be scheduled, run, and automatically distributed.
Relationship Manager includes a trend line report that tracks the aggregate relationship strength between the firm and its clients. The trend line breaks into detail to show the individual strength of relationship between principals and clients.
Future columns will dive into InterAction with the IQ module and gES with Relationship Manager. Because accurate contact data are hard to get and maintain–and relationships are not easy.
Attorney Sean Doherty has been following enterprise and legal technology for more than 15 years as a former senior technology editor for UBM Tech (formerly CMP Media) and former technology editor for Law.com and ALM Media. Sean analyzes and reviews technology products and services for lawyers, law firms, and corporate legal departments. Contact him via email at sean.doherty@ibmverse.com and follow him on Twitter: @SeanD0herty.
